Slain (24 page)

“It was a girl last time too, you know. He did all that stuff for a girl.” Her words bite. Whatever trouble she believes her son is in, it’s my fault. I’m mute because she’s right. Jackson wouldn’t be here right now if it wasn’t for me.

“What is it about boys that makes them do damn near anything for a little pussy?” She looks me up and down. “At least the last girl was pretty.”

Tears prick my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to get him into trouble.”

“Sure you didn’t. You do that little-miss-innocent act for him too? I’m a girl too, sweetheart. I know all the tricks.”

I swipe at my eyes. “You can think whatever you want about me, but your son didn’t do anything wrong. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“You think it matters if he’s actually guilty?” She scoffs. “That’s the thing about the police. They don’t need real guilt. All they need is enough to make a jury believe he is. And a kid with his background? He wasn’t guilty last time either, but it didn’t make a bit of difference. Not after what that girl said.”

“I don’t understand.” Jackson never said anything about a girl.

“It was the girl that wanted to shoot that kid, not Jackie.” Shoot? Jackson didn’t say anything about a gun. “She made up a story about that kid attacking her so of course Jackie lost it. He didn’t even put bullets in the gun, just wanted to scare him. But all the police found afterward was the gun in his room. The rest didn’t matter.”

She stands, and she’s even taller than I thought she was, nearly six feet, I’d bet. Jackson said she used to be a model when she was a teenager, and I can almost see it. Under the cry-puffy eyes and wind-ravaged hair there’s a bone structure and symmetry to her face that’s piercing.
 

“I won’t let that happen to him again, understand?” she says. “I won’t.”

“Mom? What’s going on?” The voice is Jackson’s. He’s standing behind me with someone who must be his dad. He’s tall, six-five probably, and lumberjack strong.

“I should go,” I say. “I’m really sorry.”

“Emma, wait,” Jackson says. But I don’t.

I hurry outside. It’s raining now. It’s the kind of hard spring rain that can’t decide if it wants to be liquid or ice. It feels like shards of glass hitting my face, but I like it. Out here, no one can see the tears. I fumble for my keys and remember. Jackson gave me a ride. I have to go home with my parents.

Jackson bursts out the door. “You can’t listen to her,” Jackson says. I don’t say anything. Slowly, the rain dots on his shirt blend together until there are no more dots, just wet. “She’s just trying to protect me, okay? She’d say anything.”

“Like that you pulled a gun on somebody?” I ask.

His forehead wrinkles in pain, and I know it’s true. He shoves his hands in his pockets and looks down at the ground.

“Why didn’t you tell me? Especially after all this?”

“Would you really be with a guy like me if you knew that?”

Maybe he’s right. I don’t know if I would have, especially not back when we first met. Now, everything twists up in my mind, throwing all my fears into the spotlight and mixing them up with all that we’ve shared since.

I start to speak, not sure what words will come out. Not sure whether this is something I can forgive or whether it means so much more. But just as I get the breath into my lungs, my parents walk out.

My dad glares at Jackson. I’ve never seen so much hate in his eyes. I’ve never seen Jackson look so small.

“Come on, Emma. We’re leaving,” my dad says.

He grabs my elbow, actually grabs it, and yanks me toward the car.
 

I don’t say goodbye, just look back at him and see his rain-wet face, and his shoulders, shivering in the cold. At least that’s what I try to tell myself, that the shaking is because of the cold.

“I’
M
AT
THE
END
of my rope, Emma. I really am,” my mom says. She’s pacing, walking a path in front of me on the couch.

I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say.
 

I look over to my dad. We’re in the family room, and he’s sitting on a stiff wingback chair that’s really a recliner. He’s staring at his folded hands. He has the same look he used to get before he spanked me as a child. If I was younger, he probably would.

Finally, he speaks. They’re the first words I’ve heard from him in two hours.

“What would you do, Emma, if you were in our position?” he asks. He’s not really looking for my opinion. He’s illustrating his own frustration.

“I don’t know,” I say. Believe me? Help me? Defend me?

“We’re worried about you,” my mom says.

“I know you are. I’m sorry. I should have been honest about Jackson.”

“It’s not just that,” my mom says. “It’s the lying and the secrets and the way you’ve been acting lately. Principal Hendricks came to see me today. He said that your grades are slipping, that you failed two tests.”

“I’ve just been under a lot of pressure.”

“He also said some of the teachers and students had concerns about whether you were on drugs today. They even went so far as to search your locker.” Her voice is shaky, unsure. It comes out as almost a question, but not quite. She wants me to tell her she’s wrong. “Are you on something, Emma?”

“Of course not,” I say. “I got hit by a car last night. I got no sleep. I could barely stay awake at school today. I shouldn’t have been there at all.”
 

She just shakes her head.

“Stop it with the excuses. We heard the song, Emma. We saw the texts. We know you’re far more involved with that boy than you’ve told us,” Dad says. His face has gone apple red. This is the last thing he wants to be talking about with his daughter. There’s no manual for Your-Daughter-Is-Possibly-A-Slut-And-A-Murderer. I almost feel sorry for him.

My mom gives him a look to back down then crosses the room and sits next to me on the couch, her knees angled toward me, ankles crossed, back straight. She’s always careful of every nuance in her body and demeanor, a side effect of her upper-class upbringing. Right now she could just as easily be talking to the Ladies Aid Society circa 1950 as sitting in her own living room with her disgraced teenage daughter.
 

When I was a child, I used to imitate her, sitting prim and proper, but I got the sense eventually that she didn’t like it. She’d see me at the dinner table folding my napkin across my lap, trying to impress her. But she’d look away, intentionally not giving me attention for the behavior. The generous part of me likes to think she didn’t want to subject me to the same standards she grew up with, didn’t want to Stepford-ize me the way she felt she had been. The less generous part wonders if she married my father because in his world she was rare and precious, and didn’t want anyone, including her own daughter, to have a piece of what made her special.

Seeing her now, just as untouchable, just as perfect as always, makes me recoil. I fold myself into the corner, hugging my knees to my chest.

“What’s going on between you and that boy?” she asks.

“Nothing. Really,” I say. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Don’t lie to me. I can see it on your face. And frankly, I’ve been seeing it for months,” she says.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I say. It sounds like a challenge coming out of my mouth. Maybe it is.

She sighs, and then scoots back into the couch. She tucks her knees under herself, still like a proper lady at a picnic, but at least more relaxed. She stares out the window into the slowly darkening backyard. We’re both quiet for a long time.
 

“Can I tell you something?” she asks, though it’s not really a question. “I wasn’t a virgin when I married your father.”

“Gloria—“ my dad says.

What did she just say? My eyes lift cautiously from my knees to her face.

“No. It’s time she knows.” She turns back to me. “You know my parents aren’t believers. I didn’t come to Jesus until my senior year of high school, and by then it was already too late.”

I can’t believe this. My perfect mother wasn’t a virgin when she got married?

“And once you’ve crossed that line, well, it’s very difficult to stay on the other side of it. I struggled with it quite a bit, even after I called myself a Christian, until I met your father.”

I’m equally shocked and fascinated. This little dent in her makes her more human to me than she’s ever been before. I want to ask her questions, figure out who she was back then. I want to know everything, except maybe the bits about my dad.

“He was the first man who respected me enough not to pressure me.”

I sneak a glance at him. He’s looking away, probably wishing he wasn’t here, clearly angry that she’s telling me this story. He probably thinks it’s giving me permission.
 

Mom scoots closer, reaches out her hand to mine. It feels good. “So whatever you have to tell me, it can’t be as bad as what I’ve done in my life, okay? All I’m asking is for you to be honest.”

She’s looking me right in the eyes now. I want to tell her everything, but I’m scared.

“There’s nothing we can’t figure out together, but not unless we’re honest with each other, okay?”

I nod. It would feel so good to let it go, put it behind me. But the words won’t come out of my mouth.

“Have you and Jackson had sex?”

I nod yes.

Tears dot the corners of her eyes, but she fights them back. I think she doesn’t want me to know how much this hurts her to hear, but I do know. I’ve always known it would. She blames herself.

“Thank you for being honest with me,” she says, but her tone has gone icy. I know right away I’ve made a mistake.

My dad speaks, his tone direct and even. “You’ve demonstrated an extreme lack of discretion and self-control in your personal relationships and at school and in your behavior toward your mother and me.” Discretion. Of course. It all leads back to them. “It’s as though a thief has come in the night and stolen the daughter we loved. You’re not the person we thought you were.”

“No, I’m not,” I say. “I can’t be.” My voice is choked. I didn’t plan to tell them yet, but I’ve come this far, haven’t I?
 

“What do you mean?” It’s my mom. Her voice is almost broken. It’s the most unsure of herself I’ve ever heard her, and exactly why I wanted to avoid having this conversation until I was long gone.
 

I am their only child. They look at me as an accomplishment. Who I really am will not just disappoint them, it will rock their own beliefs about themselves. It feels selfish of me, wrong, like something I would say for the sole purpose of hurting them. But it’s not to hurt them, not at all. It’s just the truth. And the truth is the only way forward.

“I don’t know if I believe in God anymore,” I say. “At least not the way you want me to.”

My mother drops her face to her hands. My father leaves the room.

I
T
HAPPENED
AT
C
AMP
IdRaHaJe last summer. Well, it started a long time before that, but it ended there.

IdRaHaJe is the summer camp everyone in our Rocky Mountain Church District goes to. And it’s not some name for a Native American tribe that you’ve never heard of. It stands for I’d Rather Have Jesus. I mean, seriously? No one ever asks, “Rather than what?”

It was the last night of camp. We’d been there all week, and I remember thinking that this was it. My last chance, His last chance.

It was sweat sticky and July hot. The crowd inside the barn-turned-church was teeming with an invisible energy that tore through them like a tornado through brush, only I couldn’t feel any of it. There were kids dancing and crying and raising their hands to the sky. There were kids speaking in tongues, kids slain in the Spirit, lying on the floor in spiritual comas as others huddled around them, their hands outstretched to pray over them.

I wanted it too.
 

I’d been wanting it forever. Receiving your spiritual gifts for the first time is sort of like getting a letter from Hogwarts. You either get one or you don’t, and it’s kind of a big deal if you don’t. I’d been jealous ever since Chloe Aster started speaking in tongues at our sixth grade outdoor ed trip. It was like a domino effect after that, everyone finding their gifts of the Spirit. When Ruth started singing in tongues a year later, clear and full and heartbreaking, it was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard. And when Mike gave his first prophecy a year after that, we all felt blessed and awed.
 

But that night at camp was five years after sixth grade, and I still hadn’t had that moment all my friends had had, the moment when I felt the Holy Spirit move through me like wildfire. When I turned fifteen, out of embarrassment and jealousy, and also a little hope that the idea itself
was
God speaking to me, I started faking it, speaking in tongues so that others would think I hadn’t been left behind.

It was surprisingly easy to mimic the sounds, to make up nonsense words that sounded nearly identical to what others were speaking. I figured it would happen for me eventually, and making others believe that I was the same as them would take the pressure off. But it only made me feel the pressure more, especially after nothing happened.

There were only two possibilities. Either I was unworthy, or everyone was lying, faking it just like me. Neither seemed possible, but one of them had to be the truth. I decided it was me.
 

So I studied more. I prayed more.

But after a year or so of being perfect, of doing everything I could think to do, even breaking up with Nicolas, who was a sexual temptation, and dating Mike, who was a spiritual leader, the growing doubts dug deeper into the cracked crevices of my heart. At youth camp, after a week of devotionals and study and prayer, I was out of ideas and spiritually exhausted.
 

Kids younger than me, kids who had done terrible things and average kids who seemed like lukewarm Christians at best were getting the gifts of the Spirit left and right—callings into ministry, even. Missionaries, pastors, pastors’ wives, doctors, lawyers, actors, musicians—everything.